The Boy Scouts, Gays, and Civil Society Minding Its Own Business

In the entry on judicial activism found inthe classic Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, Robert Nisbet wrote of the “whole web of authority that naturally exists in any society, a web spun by family, locality, voluntary association, business enterprise, profession, and civil law.” Conservatives properly cherish the autonomy of this “web of authority,” while recognizing that it can, at times, be a haven for terrible injustice.

Having read that last sentence, the Jim Crow regime of the old South is probably on the tip of your tongue: wasn’t it necessary, in that case, for the federal government to intrude into that that web and impose its will?

I agree that it was.

But not every injustice rises to the level of Jim Crow.

Take the question of the Boy Scouts of America’s policy of barring membership to gays. Even if one believes that gays fundamentally have the right to marry, it’s less obvious to me that they have a right to join the Boy Scouts. As the Supreme Court, narrowly but correctly, decided in a 2000 case involving an expelled scoutmaster in New Jersey, the BSA is not a motel, restaurant, or “public accommodation” of any kind; it is a private organization whose First Amendment-guaranteed freedom of association trumps your desire, however blameless, to serve in it.

But if the Supreme Court is the court of final appeal in our legal system, it is not the final word of civil society. Thirteen years later, the BSA has signaled, with a microcosmic nod to the principles of federalism, that it will let local chapters decide whether to admit gay scouts and scout leaders.

So instead of a controversial legal remedy, followed by years of embittered acquiescence, the BSA is changing voluntarily. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins would insist, not without reason, that we should use the word “voluntarily” advisedly. “If the board capitulates to the bullying of homosexual activists, the Boy Scouts’ legacy of producing great leaders will become yet another casualty of moral compromise. The Boy Scouts should stand firm,” he said in a statement.

Time will tell if the Boy Scouts’ compromise renders their mission, well, compromised. But it strikes me that private actors adjudicated this conflict on their own. It required no diktat from the executive branch or the federal bench. Social peace has been preserved.

Hide 39 comments

39 Responses to The Boy Scouts, Gays, and Civil Society Minding Its Own Business

There are two distinct changes brought about by the civil rights act, one good, one bad.

The first is to force the State and local GOVERNMENT to treat people equally under the law, e.g. literacy tests need to be applied to all or none. (The former would be an improvement since the 17th ammendment).

The second is extending it to apply to every private party shattering any freedom of (non-)association.

It established that the Federal Government can force individuals and businesses to “associate” with people they find odious even against their will upon penalty of law.

Had they not done so, I doubt the segregation would have lasted more than a few years, at least the overt segregation. Shame works slowly but inexorably.

Instead we got things like cross-town busing which destroyed the cities. (Will William Lind support trains to desegregate or will those whom this is imposed upon move to the exburbs as the earlier generation moved to the suburbs?)

And now that we have established the principle that the Feds can coerce anyone, we have over 25 years ago Bob Jones U losing their tax deduction, and now the Catholic church having to decide about sending orphans to be adopted by gay couples and otherwise accept gay marriage, and contraception.

Subsidiarity anyone?

Using a different evil to attempt to ameliorate an evil will always backfire.

Excellent point. But no matter how the Boy Scouts came to change their policy, our son will never participate in BSA until and unless they change back to their original policy. Millions of other parents will make the same decision, that’s my prediction.

What concerns me, as a long-time registered member of the Scouts, is whether, under this “voluntary” system, councils or troops that decide — perhaps at the behest of their sponsoring institutions — not to admit gays will be left alone to do so. After all, it’s a small step from someone insisting that he has a “right” to join a particular organization to insisting that he has has a “right” to join any specific chapter or branch of that organization he wishes. If not then I see the LDS Church, for example — which has enthusiastically embraced Scouting and used it as an important part of its own youth program — abandoning it wholesale (or setting up its own parallel alternative), and some churches deciding that they can no longer sponsor troops.

If The Boys Scouts received absolutely no government support or tax benefits whatsoever, they’d be free to be as retrogressive as they’d wish to be. BSA, however, get lots and lots of giveaways, subsidies, accomodations, etc., and their accreditation is actually considered a qualifying factor for promotion and employment in many government jobs.

So, that’s why the government should be telling BSA that they cannot discriminate against gay people. Either you let people join who qualify or you give up all public support: the choice is yours.

I am not a fan of the BSA, and I can not for the life of me understand why so many people, gay or otherwise, who share my opinion are so inclined to see a better BSA, rather than a better alternative to the BSA.

Also, I don’t want to get too off topic, but in regards to the discussion on the rightings of past wrongs, such as Jim Crow, I feel like even Rod bows to political correctness, or at least furthers that kind of assumption. If one thinks we did the right things and did them right, they feel no need to explain why, where if someone thinks we did the wrong thing, or even the right thing in the wrong way, no amount of explaining will suffice to spare them from the excesses of what might be called “post-modern” political disourse.

If I can specifically address the issue of legislating positive social change, I think we often get our causalities backwards. Legislation has never been at the vanguard of reform, it is in my understanding always, at least in any major examples, the result of existing social changes and calls for more change, and it is thus, rightly or wrongly, primarily an effect and only secondarily a cause.

The only party being discriminated against is the BSA. Unable to define its membership, no organization can survive. Disgusting little fascists who take it upon themselves to decide upon who we can associate with continue to make the country less tolerant and less diverse. Anyone who believed the “gay” movement would be satisfied with tolerance for their space needs to wake up; the intolerance shown towards the BSA is the new “abnormal “. Welcoming gays into the Vatican II Church was a wonderful experiment, too, except for the victims. While our State Dept wags it finger at “homophobic” Russia, we have little but gay propaganda in this rotting country now. Can’t win our wars, can’t balance our budgets, can’t employ our people, can’t protect our borders, can’t educate our young, we still can pour upon the world our allegiance to abortion, free expression of pornography and now “gay rights” in the name of the Founding Fathers! I doubt the world will remain impressed much longer. And, no, you can’t have my guns. Ever.

I for one am so thoroughly tired of the arm of the state being used to force everyone to conform to the perverse world view of the elites. The formula is as follows: expand the reach of government through subsidies to enlarge the public square so that there is no such thing as private collective action anymore. The modern progressive state needs to take a dose of “live and let live” in my view.

There may be no government coercion here, but plainly the Boy Scours are buckling to pressure from the large corporate and foundation donor community. That community may be some people’s idea of “civil society” but it is more accurately seen as a network of like minded (and narrow minded) oligarchs whose influence on society at large is almost entirely malevolent.

I agree with Dux Bellorum, Austinopole about government support, tax benefits and other free stuff.

The Boy Scouts use my church’s building. Although my church does not believe in gay marriage (many members & pastors disagree), they are open and inviting to gays. Jesus taught us to love everyone and how to treat other people. In my opinion, banning gays is against the teaching of Christ.

Many former scouts have returned their Eagle Scout award in protest over banning gays.

I would not have let my Eagle Scout son attend the BSA, if I had known about any banning of gays.

Does anyone have any idea of the large number of gay teenagers that have experienced bullying and the large number of gay teenager suicides?

No, receiving any amount of federal money cannot be a reason for the federal government to control exactly what you do. I know sometimes it exerts pressure (selectively) in this way, but it is not right.

Don’t you realise that the Catholic Church molestation scandal consisted mostly of homosexual perverts? There are very good reasons to ban homosexuals from situations where they will spend unsupervised time in a leadership role over children. The end.

People who blame pedophilia on homosexuality are either simply desperate to jusify thier small mindedness or hatefullness, grossly misinformed about the dynamics of sexual abuse if informed at all, in hostile denial about the existance and prevelance of heterosexual abuse, cynically using hurt children as political ammo, or possibly all of the above.

Blaming child sexual abuse on a shared gender between the abuser and the victim is like saying men who rape little girls must not be that bad, or that women who rape little boys arent that bad either, because that whole line of thinking relies on denying that those “heterosexual” crimes happen, and more often than we would like.

Depressing. The Republicans are being killed by the Democrats in large measure precisely where the Democrats have embraced the tenets of libertarianism, and thus getting killed on all other other really important issues where the Democrats are anything but libertarian, and what do we see in the comments here?

Lots and lots of conservatives objecting to the libertarian idea that the BSA should be free to choose who can participate in its activities and who can’t.

I.e., not a trace of appreciation that a big reason “conservatives” are being regarded as John Hagee cave-people is because of the clarity of their desire to essentially impose a kind of quasi-religious ideology on government and the people. (If not out-and-out religious.) Whether telling us to go to war because the Bible says we have to prepare Israel for the End-Times, or—its tell-tale favorite—obsessing about people’s sex lives, there still seems no appreciation for just how ridiculous (and scary) this strikes the average, reasonable modern person.

Go ahead though, in this day and age go ahead with things like fighting to deny homosexuals the right to marry. Make yourselves look neanderthal. Make yourselves look ridiculous to every last non-foot-stomping, non-snake-handling person on the continent.

Go ahead, that is, and ignore the simply huge opportunity that can seem to exist right now with people ever-more seeming to understand the smartness of reasonable libertarianism given the failures of doing otherwise by both the Dems and Republicans.

See what happens. In the face of your failure to embrace the big, truly conservative alternative, your quasi-religious compulsionism is gonna be increasingly rejected in favor of the secular compulsionists.

Or in other words Obama is what happens, and is gonna keep on happening.

Allowing homosexuals in the Boy Scouts is suicide for the organization.

I spent 10 years in the scouts and made Eagle in the 1980’s. During my time in the scouts, we had one scoutmaster abruptly removed from his position. As a young boy, I had no idea why it happened.

As an adult looking back, it became clear that he was removed for being homosexual. He was single, late 30’s, always had plenty of cash in his wallet (which he would flash to us boys) and lived with his parents. He was also a popular scoutmaster because he liked to spend so much time with us boys.

He led many camping trips with much opportunity for close/private interaction. On our week long trip to Forrestburg, he used to take showers with us. He even had us do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation sessions with him instructing. Fortunately, for myself, that was the limit of my exposure. I can’t speak for the other boys.

My son will be of age to become a Cub Scout next year. I am the type of father who would normally be willing to volunteer with the scouts to help build the boys in to “morally straight” young men. However, I won’t come within a mile of any scout organization that has a whiff of homosexuality tolerance. I’ll find other venues for my son that don’t involve homosexuals.

Concerning the Boy scouts, I am a lot more mad at them banning atheists, something for which there is no “child protection” reason. On any account, if I would be gay, I would be quite stongly offended by that argument as equating homosexuals with child molesters is pretty much the same as equating heterosexuals with rapists.

I don’t know if you’re arguing about what the law actually says or the principle, but I am talking about the principle, and it’s not just federal. It’s about a huge host of direct cash transfers, subsidies and privileges, such as access to public buildings, and, what I think is the most important feature, which is that being an Eagle Scout is considered grounds for promotion and pay raise in government jobs. Having been a member of the organisation translates into direct professional and financial benefits in government jobs, at every level.

Now, I don’t mind any of this in and of itself, but the thing is that if you’re getting all those benefits, your membership should be open to any reasonably qualified person, and being gay is not a reasonable disqualifier.

2. “control exactly what you do”

Saying that one may not institutionalise bigotry on the basis of pseudoscience is not identical to writing entire programmatic curricula. Sorry, you fail. If the government were to say, “You must use British orthography in your written materials and not teach Scouts how to play cat’s cradle.”, that’d be a level of specificity that’d be unjustified.

3. “Homosexual perverts”

This is thoroughly debunked, over and over again, by both the American Psychiatric Association and the FBI. Either you are ignorant of the science in this issue or you are willing to ignore it in the name of pushing an ideological belief. Either way, this doesn’t deserve to be dignified with a response.

If the BSA buckles to these demands, they won’t be able to draw the line anywhere. Once the sexual revolutionaries flood in, scouting traditionalists will fall away.

I would expect that there will be a schism, similar to what has happened with the Girl Scouts and the breakaway formation of the American Heritage Girls over the infiltration of radical feminism. Christians and traditionalists will be driven out of the BSA as it transforms itself into the Rainbow Rangers. A generation from now the BSA will be unrecognizable.

Organized groups and clubs of many kinds are shrinking away; the Girl Scouts have been accepting of lesbians for years and aren’t doing that well. Scouts Canada boasted of having a Gay Scout Troop twenty years ago-it disbanded a few years after it started and Scouts Canada has had even worse membership problems than the Scouts in the US, despite their officially welcoming policies on gays and atheists.
If local Scout councils allow the openly gay in their memberships, this is probably just doing officially what they’ve been doing under the radar for years.
You’re right that this is about money; religious groups that are “progressive”/”gay positive” make up barely 5% of those between 18-30. The Scouts have problems because Mainline Protestantism has problems-the same problems, as it turns out. They don’t have nearly as many children as they used to do before 1960 and what children they do have don’t want to be involved in organized religion or in Scouts.
Any attempts to create more conservative Scouts that ban gays will face massive funding problems, not to mention massive difficulties buying decent Scout camps.

It’s really a sad commentary that many of the commenters here seem to think that having gay scouts, scout masters and volunteers will automatically lead to abuse in the woods, etc etc ad nauseum. Such thinking is not true, and not reflective of who actually abuses kids and teenagers.

The BSA is very much like the Catholic Church, because those two organizations had/have pedophilic leaders, who committed lots and lots of abuse (worldwide for the Church priests, bishops, archbishops, and yes, Popes) who did nothing but play scramble the players from one location to another, and another.

Actual gays, who did everything to become Eagle Scouts, were well trained masters and life-coaches, get kicked out for being “gay”. Even though many Christian denominations allow and revere gays (the BSA uses the against “God” bile as an excuse)….

And yes, look at the BSA board. Many are Fortune-500 CEO’s. CEO’s of companies that are very gay friendly, and which reflect both long-standing values and understand current society.

As the BSA was actually chartered by the US Congress, they should reflect the nation.

For Mike, and JB and the others —-what does a “whiff” of homsexuality smell like? Will your children get gay cooties? Your kids will never be allowed to have gay friends? Are you going to be “helicopter” parents all their life?

Sadly, racism isn’t dead in this country, and neither is bigotry. Scouts can, do and will make both of those less prevalent in this nation, and some of those Scouts are, have been, and will be gay. And kudos to them!

You’ve got to love Mike’s (apparent) argument that homosexuals will molest boy scouts because when he was a boy scout he believes he had a homosexual scout leader who did not molest him. He was taught some evil CPR skills, though.

“Gays taking your sons into the woods overnight … what could possibly go wrong?” (Steve Sailer) Okay, Steve–we all know your feelings about gays, but this is a low blow. Equating gays and pedophiles is false and mean. Being attracted sexually to an age-appropriate same-sex partner and being sexually fixated on children are two totally different things. Offering a principled objection to homosexual behavior is one thing. Resorting to painting gays as child rapists stinks of Anita Bryant.

Nothing. The BSA has done an outstanding job of instituting practices to prevent molestation. These include but are not limited to: 1) the simple rule that no adult is ever alone with a single scout. This protects the scouts from abuse, and the adults from false allegations of abuse. 2) scouts and adults camp and sleep in separate areas. 3) manditory youth protection training for all adults, retaken every two years. 4) no nudity. 5) Two deep leadership – at least two adults present at all functions/events.

He led many camping trips with much opportunity for close/private interaction. … he used to take showers with us.

All of this is strictly forbidden. The BSA has a well established procedure for confidential reporting of such abuse.

the BSA buckles to these demands, they won’t be able to draw the line anywhere.

The Supreme Court has ruled (correctly IMHO) that as a private organization, the BSA can draw the line wherever it wishes. What BSA has decided to do is to let local councils set their policy based on local standards. This seems fair and prudent.

Lord Baden Powell spins in his grave.

It is irrelevant to this issue, but there is substantial evidence that Lord Baden Powell was himself homosexual, and while sexually interested in boys, did not act on it. google “Baden Powell gay” for references.

The simple truth is that LGBT kids are more likely to attempt suicide than straight kids.

This is true, and scouting can provide a safe, asexual haven for such youth. A second group of youth the current ban has impacted is sons of lesbians. These boys benefit from male role models, but unfortunately the current policy is off-putting to many lesbian parents — but not all. One of my fellow assistant scoutmasters (and a close friend) is a woman married to another woman, who is the mother of a soon-to-be Eagle scout.

I believe the Scouts made a blunder here. They have decided that they can feed the crocodile slowly–“I will just cut off my hand and feed it to the crocodile. Oh, he’s still hungry–well, here’s my leg. That should make him go away.”

Does anyone actually believe that, now that gays can join, there will be no further calls for admission? How long until an explicitly faith-based organization like the BSA is similarly “convinced” to allow atheists? And, since there is no difference between male and female, how about girls?

My brother, who was gay, belonged to the Gay Mens’ Chorus of Portland, Maine. I belonged to the Boy Scouts. Which of those two organizations was discriminatory? It is simple–both were. And, in America, that used to be permitted.